Gopal.V writes: "Adobe is recognizing what was a square peg for a round hole and killing Flash for mobile devices. But they're not going away, instead shifting focus towards the more capable (but same 'ol, same 'ol) Air platform for mobile devices. But the brief interlude at least will help the HTML5 bandwagon gain some traction & finally agree on some codecs and not just the markup. And perhaps, just perhaps the authoring tools (unfortunately, what's there other than Adobe Edge?) will catch up too."

Gopal.V writes: KDE India has announced it's hosting conf.kde.in, a five day long event in March to introduce & promote contributions to KDE from India. Should be an interesting effort to push the youth of India towards writing more free & open software, especially on the desktop where it desperately needs some love.

Gopal.V writes: Youtube is down right now, serving out a 503 status page. It wouldn't be a big deal for most, except for the timing of the outage.Indian Premier League being streamed live (well, delayed by a bit) on youtube. So on an afternoon when Bangalore is playing a match, youtube just went down. Has youtube been IPL-dotted, because the local ISP has lifted bandwidth limits on this youtube channel.

Gopal.V writes: Jon Stewart took up the cause of Net Neutrality in last night's daily show episode. Even though daily show was a little biased, the topic under discussion was John McCain's Internet Freedom Act of 2009 which is essentially a death knell for net neutrality. US being pretty much the central routing hub of the entire internet, this will certainly affect everyone everywhere. Please note that the video is not advised for anyone who likes Unicorns.

t3rmin4t0r writes: "Just when you were breathing easy about Kaminsky, DNS and the word hijacking, by repeating the word SSL in your head, the hackers at CCC were busy at work making a hash of SSL certificate security. Here's the scoop on how they set up their own rouge CA, by (from what I can figure) reversing the hash and engineering a collision up in MD5 space. Until now, md5 collisions have been ignored because nobody would put in that much effort to create a useful dummy file, but a CA certificate for phishing seems juicy enough to be fodder for the botnets now."

t3rmin4t0r writes: "Google has announced Google native client which is enables x86 native code to be run securely inside a browser. With java applets already dead and buried, this could mean the end of the new war between browsers and the various javascript engines (V8, Squirrelfish, Tracemonkey). The only question remains whether it can be secured (ala ActiveX) and whether the advantages carry over onto non-x86 platforms.The package is available for download from its Google code site. Hopefully, I can finally write my web apps in asm."

t3rmin4t0r writes: "Some what suddenly, Eric S Raymond has bid good bye to Fedora. Many
of his comments are probably valid — but rather than his decision to leave for Ubuntu, the praise for the new
Canonical/Linspire deal
(for Click-n-Run and proprietary codecs) will probably prove to be more controversial."

t3rmin4t0r writes: "Yahoo! has launched Pipes, a unixy way of remixing web content — in a somewhat "leg bone connected to the ankle bone" fashion — with connectors and filters/mutators, ending up with something very similar to the shell way of doing things, except with a cool javascript designer which faintly reminds you of ye olde Java Studio.

If you don't like content from Y! or flickr, this supports feeds from google base, which should make things interesting for real estate data at least. The tool definitely has a "Go forth and write your own aggregators" feel to it, rather than directly hooking into mashup land. As far as I'm concerned, I can finally create a pipe which filters out all the angst-ridden self-loathing out of blog feeds."

t3rmin4t0r writes: "A
buffer overflow exploit
has been detected in
Google Earth. The vulnerability uses a malformed.kml file, subscribed or automatically refreshed
by the application. It is being disputed whether this could be used to insert a canned payload (like the
vnc dlls) — but nobody really has come out with the code, so far.

The Linux version of Google Earth and the NASA WorldWind's KMLImporter are not reported as vulnerable."

t3rmin4t0r writes: "Yahoo! has brought out a
new auth system
for their single-sign-on system, which lets other third party websites to authenticate and access user content, after user login.
Or as the ydn blog said "Our Users Can Be Your Users Too".
The
Yahoo! Photos api, which uses this, has already been announced and if I read the
cards right, a Yahoo! Mail api is currently being demo'd before the open hackday participants."

Gopal.V writes: As part of their Y! Developer Network programme, Yahoo! is holding a developer only two-day event — Sept 29th & 30th. You can read more about it on hackday.org or techcrunch.
The idea seems to to extend the energy and enthusiasm that came out of the Hack Days, purely internally
and add a little zing to it in terms of external contributors, not to mention a bit of community
interaction.

Considering all the cool stuff that has
come out of the original hack days (as ycoolthing shows), this could be really a good idea. So if you've been hacking away with some random Y! api, here's a stage for you to show up and beat the masters at their own game.